They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need.
Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.
Same; avid reader of printed books here. I have more pdfs I can count (most coming from Humble Bundle impulse buying), but nothing beats physical books for me.
I got a remarkable pro, and it's just slightly better than screen. Being able to annotate books is actually a welcomed addition, and the screen is pretty decent. But flipping screen is slow (compared to a printed book), and going back and forth between pages is a hassle. Until we have the speed of a tablet (read: instant), with the screen quality of an e-ink, I don't think I'll voluntarily retire printed books.
Now, I have an O'Reilly subscription (two actually, through school and ACM), but the app is sadly horrendous, as OP mentioned. Hard to believe this is actually their core business.
If you're an OMSCS student, most courses offer the download through Ed or Canvas. Usually it's a big zip file under the first lesson, but I've seen some available in the shared Dropbox. I've seen this for GIOS, ML4T, ML, and a few others. Or you can just reach out to the TAs.
If you're not a student, then it gets a bit tricky. Some courses are available as YouTube playlists or on Coursera, but then it becomes a hassle to download and piece together hundreds of individual files.
Feel free to drop me a note (email in my profile), or open an issue on github.
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I'm not a student there. I just saw that they were making some of their lessons publicly available and wanted to organize the material for myself. I'm experiencing their courseware through the 2 minute long micro lessons on the Ed platform and I don't see any way to download the videos.
Some courses are widely available on YT [1], and already in the more palatable (IMO) long-form format instead of hundreds of 1-2 min snippets. Some other courses you can find download links somewhere [2].
So yeah, it's a bit of a hassle, and but you can probably still piece it together for some/most courses that are publicly available.
My (tablet) PDF reader has bookmarks (which I use to make a TOC if needed) and annotations and cloud sync of the PDFs to my phone for on the go. And it has text search and zoom. Plus it holds hundreds of books that I can carry with me.
They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't
With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins
I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to
I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.